Introduction

Summary

Of German Indian parentage, Anita Mazumdar Desai was born and grew up in India. Since the 1950s, she has lived in New Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay and other Indian cities, until the early 1990s when she began to spend part of her year in the United States. She started publishing her work in India soon after her marriage to Ashrin Desai in 1958. In a writing career which has spanned more than four decades, Anita Desai has agreed to few interviews, and in them she has shown a marked reticence about her own personal life. In an interview in 1988, shortly after the publication of Baumgartner's Bombay, she was asked about her mixed parentage, and while affirming her selfidentification as ‘totally Indian’ and that India has been her ‘whole world’, she also drew a rare connection between her maternal – and German – upbringing and herself as Indian: ‘I am able to look at a country I know so intimately with a certain detachment, and that certainly comes from my mother because I'm aware of how she would have reacted to people and to situations. I feel about India as an Indian, but I suppose I think about it as an outsider.’

The notion of thinking as an outsider, and the detachment or critical distance which this entails, is a key to an understanding of Desai as writer, and will be a recurrent theme in the discussions of her novels and short stories in this book. It informs her authorial perspectives on India, its places, scenes, and people, and her creative engagement, through narrative, with those who, through a combination of accident and choice, find themselves marginalized, displaced, and dispossessed. In the interview, Desai traces her fascination with the outsider to notable instances in her early reading: ‘I remember the first time I read Camus’ The Stranger, what a tremendous impression it made on me. There was a time when I read that book over and over again. … Dostoevski was the other writer I think who interested me so much when I was young. And again it was this other-worldliness of his characters.’